intemperie

Redefining success

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 23:12:00 +0100

For a long time, I thought success was being hired by a big company.

During the last few years, I’ve seen lots of my dearest friends and most respected designers go to San Francisco to work for some of the biggest companies in the world. I wanted to be there with them, breathing the same air… being part of the big thing, but I knew I wasn’t ready.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

— Steve Jobs

I was working as a Front-End developer by that time. After lots of effort, I found my first chance to work as a designer (what I really wanted to do) in one of the biggest companies in Spain: the social network Tuenti. It was great, but I wanted more…

In seven months, my boss, the one who gave me my first chance, talked to me about a new and very exciting VOD product he was going to move into. “I want you in my team”, he said, and not without thinking about it very deeply, I jumped in… and it was amazing. We had the chance to create not only a product, but a company from scratch, defining everything from a mere concept to the latest detail. We were respected, and we had a very important role in that company. For a time, I really felt complete there: great team, great job, great responsibilities, chances to actually do things that I’d never done before… but suddenly I felt like I needed more…

By that time, a very well known music company contacted me for a position in Stockholm. It was like a dream come true, so I started the process with them. After a couple of nice interviews, a design test and two months in the process I finally got invited for the final interview(s) there. I thought I did it well, so I came back to Madrid pretty confident about getting the job.

When I came back to Youzee, the rumors of a massive layoff were hitting the office. In three days, I got an email from the other company: “Thanks for applying, but you’ve been rejected”. It was really bad… I thought I deserved better after all I’d been through than a prefabricated email. The interviews, the test, the time passing with the uncertainty arguing with my girlfriend about moving to Sweden or not… and I didn’t even apply for the position! They called me! Then Youzee started firing everybody in the company but enough engineers to maintain the service up. The money was gone, the project came to an end and I was completely devastated.

Luckily, I had lots of good offers. However, that feeling of not being ready enough for applying on the big ones was gone, so I started doing it so. I had response from very exciting places like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, but only one of those germinated, one with one of the biggest browser vendors in the world. Same process: seven interviews, three months. Same result: “Thanks for applying, but…”. Same feeling: “I’d like to have a deeper explanation and not a prefab email in my inbox”. I felt like a piece of meat no one cared about… and then I started to realize that maybe that wasn’t what I really needed. I was really disappointed with the treatment of “the big ones” gave me, so I took a chance on a small company called Spartanbits.

When I made the interview there I soon realized about two things: that they really needed my help, and that the company had something special in its culture. I took it as a different kind of challenge and it was good at the start. I started reorganizing the design process, asking lots of questions, and suggesting changes. Probably, it wasn’t the right time to do it as energetically as I did, because they were in the middle of a huge release that took too much time, but it seemed the time for doing such changes never came. I felt like I couldn’t put my name on the product, as the design quality made me feel embarrassed, so I started burning out to the point I wanted to leave the company. I realized that changes never come fast, that it’s really difficult to plant the seed of good design and make it grow. It takes a lot of time. There were lots of other things happening around, and not all of them good…

Today, our CEO publicly announced the company has come to an end. To me, it has been eye opening. I immediately remembered a phrase my good friend Edu tweeted a while ago, when we were both about to leave Youzee:

If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help you build theirs.

— Tony Gaskins

Well… and here I am. After being in the end of two startups I feel like I really need to stop and take some oxygen. And who knows? maybe starting something on my own, which is something that never crossed my mind before. But I really think now is the right time for myself. Dunno what will happen next, but one thing is for sure: I don’t see success the same way I did one year ago. Now it’s time to redefine what success means!

Thoughts on iOS' Local Weather

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 09:20:43 +0100

This last May I went to visit New York with my girlfriend, so I started to make all the preparations. And you know… when you’re so excited about visiting some place you don’t want the weather to ruin your stay, so I added New York to the Weather app in my phone.

And when I checked the weather being there, I noticed something awkward: The Local Weather showed New York, but I had another card showing the same city, as I added it before. I decided to leave it and enjoy my stay, but then I went back to Madrid and I experienced the exact same thing, as I added a Madrid card to check out how the weather was going to be when I was back.

Would it be so hard to automatically hide the manually added New York Card while I was in New York and the Madrid one while I was in Madrid? Technically, It’d potentially consume more battery, as you want the card to be hidden before you open the app, so it looks like magic. That’d require more access to the location services and probably some background process. Maybe it’s not worth it for such a stupid thing, but isn’t it the kind of thing you expect from Apple? to make things work like magic?

Dealing with iOS screenshots

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:48:00 +0200

If you design iOS applications, this situation will probably look familiar to you: Your Camera Roll and your Photo Stream are filled with app screenshots mixed with your daily pictures and killing kittens. I’ve wondering for a while if is there a solution for this. The answer is yes there are many, but none of them is perfect.

The crappy native way

Yeah, you can create albums in your Photos.app. You can delete the picture immediately from your Photo Stream in order to keep it clean. However, you can’t delete it from your Camera Roll, or it will delete the image from your folder too. The process is manual and you can’t keep your Camera Roll clean, so this one is not valid for me.

Using your Mac

You may thought about using your Mac for this. You can either import your screenshots to iPhoto and sort them out automatically using a smart folder or do it manually using Image Capture —you can sort the elements by dimension in order to group them—, but no… I don’t want to connect my iPhone to my Mac.

There’s a nice tip for getting access on the Finder to your screenshots in your Photo Stream via a smart folder —sounds more complex than it is—, which is quite convenient because you don’t need to connect your iPhone to your computer at all. That would be perfect if there was a way to remove those elements from there. Removing an image from the Finder will not result in removing it from your Photo Stream/Camera Roll.

Dropbox

Well… there’s also Dropbox, and it’s a quite good one. It solves the problem of moving a bunch of files at the same time from your iPhone to your computer and vice-versa. Also, they’ve finally removed the image compression they applied before, so you can view your images in full resolution, which is great.

On the other hand, you can use their Camera Upload feature, which gives you additional space for your stuff by using it. The problem here is —again— that you’ll have everything mixed there and your phone will be still messed up.

At this point I just have to invoke the crazy mind of my friend Jono [Edit: look below. He did it!]. He will surely think about a crazy way to automate something that will end up blowing our heads up.

Screenshot Journal

Last day, I found a small gem. It’s called Screenshot Journal, a little handy iOS app that automatically imports just your screenshots and organizes them, allowing you to delete those from your Camera Roll and Photo Stream. Yes… you still have to do it manually. I’ve been told that there’s an Apple API limitation that prevents apps from deleting images from the Camera Roll that they didn’t create.

Among other niceties, it allows you to do up to 3200% zoom to your images, something you can’t actually do with Camera Roll and which is perfect for checking out details. Also, you can share those images… but sadly you have to do it one by one. I suggested the guys to be able to sync automatically with a Dropbox folder, something which hopefully will be implemented in the future.

It’s one of the best solutions I’ve found so far to solve this problem. It’s not perfect yet, but I hope they’ll keep improving it.

Other options

My friend Emanuel —it seems I’m not the only one with this problem— mentioned yesterday an app called PhotoSync.app, that I still need to check out… and there’re probably lots of other small apps trying to solve this problem, but ideally Apple should just separate photos from screenshots in Photos.app. Because Camera Roll should be just about what you take with your camera and Photo Stream should be just about photos, don’t you think?

[Edit] Mr. Jono Hunt has listened to my prays and he shared this great method using Dropbox.

Recall is the latest addition to the “Cool apps only...

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 23:12:00 +0200

Recall is the latest addition to the “Cool apps only available in the US” nonsense list, along with Facebook Camera or Apple Trailers.

Why is this? Overcommited stated:

During development we tabled additional region support until after launch because of the amount of effort required that would have pushed back the Recall release further out than what we wanted.

Is it so hard? Apps like Path already provide an excellent iTunes Store/AppStore/iBook Store integration. From my ignorance, I think it should be really easy for them to do the same.

Honestly, I don’t get it. When you release an app like this, you should think global, not local. It’s really disappointing for us, non-US citizens and potential customers of your app. And disappointment is not the best way to start a relationship, don’t you think? This is specially wrong when there’s a teaser page involved and you’re creating hype about your product.

Anyway, the example of Apple Trailers app is much worse. A service from a huge company which can be viewed from the website and which is available as an app on the Apple TV no matter which country you’re in… becomes an iOS app which is only available in the US. Why? Why on earth do they do this?

Country restrictions doesn’t make you look cool. They suck.

"If you launch Espresso from the Terminal using this script it will use the WebKit nightly (assuming..."

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:02:00 +0200

“

If you launch Espresso from the Terminal using this script it will use the WebKit nightly (assuming WebKit is installed in your root Applications folder):

 DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH="/Applications/WebKit.app/Contents/Frameworks/10.7/" WEBKIT_UNSET_DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH="YES" open -a Espresso

Note that this is not a toggle; it only affects Espresso once at a time. An easier way to do this could be via Applescript or something.

”

- Ian Beck, Macrabbit Support

On handling critiques

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:11:00 +0100

A few days ago I saw a really interesting post by Jason Zimdars about criticism. That post made me think a lot, mostly because I tend to bitch a lot about stuff. Yeah, I really do. What really made me think is a discussion I had with one of my best friends, which is an outstanding designer, about this matter. That conversation really touched me, but I rather keep it for myself, though.

After a few days thinking about it and watching many people joining the “trend” of “respect”, I think I can finally talk about it.

As a designer, I’d seen myself many times on the opposite side. During my time on Tuenti, we received a bunch of ferocious critiques. I can’t remember a single constructive one. Some of them were founded, others weren’t. It was a part of my job to handle those critiques and extract some conclusions about them. Let’s be honest: if many people are saying that they don’t like something, maybe they’re right. Don’t forget that these are the people that use your web/app/whatever on a regular basis. These are the people you get money from –directly or not–, the ones you have to please in some way. However, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to every single thing and take an action from all of them. I’m the one who knows the requirements and constraints of the product, and I’m the one who studied how to design.

Of course, some of the design decisions weren’t mine directly. What many people forgets is that there’s usually someone on top that makes the decisions. I can make the most visually appealing and usable thing in the world… but many times the stakeholder comes and says “Make it blue”, or just picks the worst option from the 10 I made. Does that mean I’m a bad designer? Not at all. Is it my fault? Well… maybe I didn’t communicate well enough my idea to that stakeholder… or maybe I did and he just didn’t listen. Shit happens.

The thing is, you can extract many information of user’s rants. Don’t take it too personal. People doesn’t have the time to make a constructive critique. They have better things to do. Complaining without thinking is also easy –maybe too much–, yes. Obviously, there’s no need to be mean. That’s so disrespectful. Things take a lot of work to get done, yes… but what about if users don’t like it?

I prefer to have negative feedback about something I made which is wrong, even if it’s not respectful or is misinformed. I know how to handle that. It’s part of my job.

[Update] We all should probably give Criticism: Myths and Childishness by Andy Rutledge a read.